Bliss Dance • Burning Man 2010

About Bliss Dance

Bliss Dance by Marco Cochrane sculpture is a unique sculpture using cutting edge design; an unabashedly breathtaking modern sculpture in structure and balance. One that celebrates humanity, and in particular the feminine beauty, power and strength that emerges when women are safe and free to be themselves.Carefully crafted by a staff of structural engineers to simultaneously withstand and enhance elements such as the high winds of nature and the human interaction she will nurture, Bliss Dance was built of steel weighing 7,000 lbs. and consuming a space 40 feet by 30 feet by 12 feet in size using two triangulated layers of geodesic structures enshrouded with a "skin" of stainless steel mesh.

http://blissdance.org/

CNET Article:

Bliss Dance weighs 7,000 pounds, is 97 percent air, and has 55,000 welds made by hand in a warehouse on San Francisco's Treasure Island. "No robots were used in the production," the artist, Marco Cochrane, joked in an interview with CNET on Wednesday.

The design, created using a low-tech pantograph modeling tool without the assistance of design software, is based on the structures of geodesic domes and has 4,500 ball joints attached to the steel mesh "skin" with screws. The sculpture, featuring a dancer balanced on one leg, is supported by six I-beams buried two feet under the surface in a radial pattern.

There are 27 multi-LED lights placed throughout the inside of the sculpture, and external lights as well. The shifting colored LED lights are controlled from an iPad touch screen using a specially created program.

"When it's lit from the inside it looks hollow, and lit from the outside it looks solid," Cochrane said. "When there's a combination of those, it gets crazy."

Those who missed seeing the sculpture at Burning Man will get a chance to see it in person when it goes on tour, Cochrane said. He's also planning for next year's sculpture, which will be even bigger.